China is using up oil faster than we can produce it

By Brad Plumer

The Washington Post - April 29, 2013

Maybe you’ve heard that North America is producing a lot more oil these days, courtesy of fracking, tar sands and other new sources. The Atlantic has a nicely reported cover story on the whole phenomenon by Charles C. Mann. Headline: “We will never run out of oil.”

It’s a great article, but here’s an key bit of additional context. Stuart Staniford has some great charts looking at the rapid growth in Chinese oil consumption over the past few decades. He’s also done a simple extrapolation to see what China’s oil demand would look like if it kept growing at 7 percent annually for another decade — hardly a wild assumption:

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